What the hell happened to Mario Party?

As a birthday gift, and as part of my ongoing quest to make my wife blissfully happy, we recently converted most of our first floor to hardwoods. They look great. But in doing so, we had to prepare for a ton of furniture to move. As I emptied out the hutch our TV sits on, I came upon our Nintendo 64.

If you follow the blog, you know that I’m a huge video game nerd. Besides the Nintendo 64, we still own our Game Cube, Wii, Wii U, XBox, XBox 360, and Xbox One. But only the Wii U and the last two Xbox machines remain hooked up.

But my daughter, upon seeing the ancient Nintendo 64, demanded I hook it up. There was only one TV that would accept the composite video cable, though, so the system is sitting in our sunroom.

We booted up Mario Party (the original), and I have to say – that game is SO MUCH BETTER than any of the recent versions we’ve bought (7-10). It’s not even close. We all had so much more fun playing it, and it seems much more of a skill-based game than any of the more recent iterations. Even the graphics aren’t that much worse.

I remember Mario Party 2 and 3 being awesome, too. So here’s my question: what happened? The model was fantastic, and they could have just kept it close to what it played like through version 3. So why did they screw it up? Why don’t they fix it?

Am I the only one who cares about this?

@aaronecarroll

P.S. And if you own a Wii U, and don’t own Super Mario Maker yet, well, then… I don’t even want to know you.

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